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Nobel Lecture

He and His Man

But to return to my new companion. I
was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to
teach him everything that was proper to make him useful,
handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and
understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar
there ever was.-- Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe

Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a
handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all
of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate
by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds
who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles
away, like the report of a gun.

The fens are home to many other kinds of
birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to
capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks,
which they call decoy ducks or duckoys.

Fens are tracts of wetland. There are
tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they
are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not
migrate.

These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man,
are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand.
Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and
Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their
kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks
live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are
covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language
which they make them understand, that in England from where they
come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have sea shores
full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks;
they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also
lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or
snow, or very light.

By these representations, he writes, which
are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys,
draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them.
They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and
settle them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of
Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in
their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told
them of, where they shall live safely and securely.

And while they are so occupied the
decoy-men, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or
coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen
toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or
duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind. And so
over two or three days they lead their guests up narrower and
narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well
we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned.

Then the decoy-men send out their decoy
dog, which has been perfectly trained to swim after fowl, barking
as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible
creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again
into the water by the arched nets above, and so must swim or
perish, under the net. But the net grows narrower and narrower,
like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take their
captives out one by one. The decoy ducks are stroked and made
much of, but as for their guests, these are clubbed on the spot
and plucked and sold by the hundred and by the thousand.

All of this news of Lincolnshire his man
writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with
his little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the
page.

In Halifax, writes his man, there stood,
until it was removed in the reign of King James the First, an
engine of execution, which worked thus. The condemned man was
laid with his head on the cross-base or cup of the scaffold; then
the executioner knocked out a pin which held up the heavy blade.
The blade descended down a frame as tall as a church door and
beheaded the man as clean as a butcher's knife.

Custom had it in Halifax, though, that if
between the knocking out of the pin and the descent of the blade
the condemned man could leap to his feet, run down the hill, and
swim across the river without being seized again by the
executioner, he would be let free. But in all the years the
engine stood in Halifax this never happened.

He (not his man now but he) sits in his
room by the waterside in Bristol and reads this. He is getting on
in years, almost it might be said he is an old man by now. The
skin of his face, that had been almost blackened by the tropic
sun before he made a parasol out of palm or palmetto leaves to
shade himself, is paler now, but still leathery like parchment;
on his nose is a sore from the sun that will not heal.

The parasol he has still with him in his
room, standing in a corner, but the parrot that came back with
him has passed away. Poor Robin! the parrot would squawk
from its perch on his shoulder, Poor Robin Crusoe! Who shall
save poor Robin? His wife could not abide the lamenting of
the parrot, Poor Robin day in, day out. I shall wring
its neck, said she, but she had not the courage to do so.

When he came back to England from his
island with his parrot and his parasol and his chest full of
treasure, he lived for a while tranquilly enough with his old
wife on the estate he bought in Huntingdon, for he had become a
wealthy man, and wealthier still after the printing of the book
of his adventures. But the years in the island, and then the
years traveling with his serving-man Friday (poor Friday, he
laments to himself, squawk-squawk, for the parrot would never
speak Friday's name, only his), had made the life of a landed
gentleman dull for him. And, if the truth be told, married life
was a sore disappointment too. He found himself retreating more
and more to the stables, to his horses, which blessedly did not
chatter, but whinnied softly when he came, to show that they knew
who he was, and then held their peace.

It seemed to him, coming from his island,
where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was
too much speech in the world. In bed beside his wife he felt as
if a shower of pebbles were being poured upon his head, in an
unending rustle and clatter, when all he desired was to
sleep.

So when his old wife gave up the ghost he
mourned but was not sorry. He buried her and after a decent while
took this room in The Jolly Tar on the Bristol waterfront,
leaving the direction of the estate in Huntingdon to his son,
bringing with him only the parasol from the island that made him
famous and the dead parrot fixed to its perch and a few
necessaries, and has lived here alone ever since, strolling by
day about the wharves and quays, staring out west over the sea,
for his sight is still keen, smoking his pipes. As to his meals,
he has these brought up to his room; for he finds no joy in
society, having grown used to solitude on the island.

He does not read, he has lost the taste for
it; but the writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of
writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation. In the evening by
candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills
and write a page or two of his man, the man who sends report of
the duckoys of Lincolnshire, and of the great engine of death in
Halifax, that one can escape if before the awful blade can
descend one can leap to one's feet and dash down the hill, and of
numbers of other things. Every place he goes he sends report of,
that is his first business, this busy man of his.

Strolling along the harbour wall,
reflecting upon the engine from Halifax, he, Robin, whom the
parrot used to call poor Robin, drops a pebble and listens. A
second, less than a second, before it strikes the water. God's
grace is swift, but might not the great blade of tempered steel,
being heavier than a pebble and being greased with tallow, be
swifter? How will we ever escape it? And what species of man can
it be who will dash so busily hither and thither across the
kingdom, from one spectacle of death to another (clubbings,
beheadings), sending in report after report?

A man of business, he thinks to himself.
Let him be a man of business, a grain merchant or a leather
merchant, let us say; or a manufacturer and purveyor of roof
tiles somewhere where clay is plentiful, Wapping let us say, who
must travel much in the interest of his trade. Make him
prosperous, give him a wife who loves him and does not chatter
too much and bears him children, daughters mainly; give him a
reasonable happiness; then bring his happiness suddenly to an
end. The Thames rises one winter, the kilns in which the tiles
are baked are washed away, or the grain stores, or the leather
works; he is ruined, this man of his, debtors descend upon him
like flies or like crows, he has to flee his home, his wife, his
children, and seek hiding in the most wretched of quarters in
Beggars Lane under a false name and in disguise. And all of this
– the wave of water, the ruin, the flight, the
pennilessness, the tatters, the solitude – let all of this
be a figure of the shipwreck and the island where he, poor Robin,
was secluded from the world for twenty-six years, till he almost
went mad (and indeed, who is to say he did not, in some
measure?).

Or else let the man be a saddler with a
home and a shop and a warehouse in Whitechapel and a mole on his
chin and a wife who loves him and does not chatter and bears him
children, daughters mainly, and gives him much happiness, until
the plague descends upon the city, it is the year 1665, the great
fire of London has not yet come. The plague descends upon London:
daily, parish by parish, the count of the dead mounts, rich and
poor, for the plague makes no distinction among stations, all
this saddler's worldly wealth will not save him. He sends his
wife and daughters into the countryside and makes plans to flee
himself, but then does not. Thou shalt not be afraid for the
terror at night, he reads, opening the Bible at hazard,
not for the arrow that flieth by day; not for the pestilence
that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at
noon-day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at
thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.

Taking heart from this sign, a sign of safe
passage, he remains in afflicted London and sets about writing
reports. I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a
woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she
cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And
the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they
say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see
no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud
brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the
sun.

It is an allegory! cries the woman
in the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him.
Thus in his report.

On another day, walking by the riverside in
Wapping, his man that used to be a saddler but now has no
occupation observes how a woman from the door of her house calls
out to a man rowing in a dory: Robert! Robert! she calls;
and how the man then rows ashore, and from the dory takes up a
sack which he lays upon a stone by the riverside, and rows away
again; and how the woman comes down to the riverside and picks up
the sack and bears it home, very sorrowful-looking.

He accosts the man Robert and speaks to
him. Robert informs him that the woman is his wife and the sack
holds a week's supplies for her and their children, meat and meal
and butter; but that he dare not approach nearer, for all of
them, wife and children, have the plague upon them; and that it
breaks his heart. And all of this – the man Robert and wife
keeping communion through calls across the water, the sack left
by the waterside – stands for itself certainly, but stands
also as a figure of his, Robinson's, solitude on his island,
where in his hour of darkest despair he called out across the
waves to his loved ones in England to save him, and at other
times swam out to the wreck in search of supplies.

Further report from that time of woe. Able
no longer to bear the pain from the swellings in the groin and
armpit that are the signs of the plague, a man runs out howling,
stark naked, into the street, into Harrow Alley in Whitechapel,
where his man the saddler witnesses him as he leaps and prances
and makes a thousand strange gestures, his wife and children
running after him crying out, calling to him to come back. And
this leaping and prancing is allegoric of his own leaping and
prancing when, after the calamity of the shipwreck and after he
had scoured the strand for sign of his shipboard companions and
found none, save a pair of shoes that were not mates, he had
understood he was cast up all alone on a savage island, likely to
perish and with no hope of salvation.

(But of what else does he secretly sing, he
wonders to himself, this poor afflicted man of whom he reads,
besides his desolation? What is he calling, across the waters and
across the years, out of his private fire?)

A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas
to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had brought back from, he
said, Brazil – a bird not so magnificent as his own
well-beloved creature but splendid nonetheless, with green
feathers and a scarlet crest and a great talker too, if the
sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit on its
perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in
case it should try to fly away, and say the words Poor Poll!
Poor Poll! over and over till he was forced to hood it; but
could not be taught to say any other word, Poor Robin! for
instance, being perhaps too old for that.

Poor Poll, gazing out through the narrow
window over the mast-tops and, beyond the mast-tops, over the
grey Atlantic swell: What island is this, asks Poor Poll,
that I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my
Saviour, in my hour of great need?

A man, being drunk and it being late at
night (another of his man's reports), falls asleep in a doorway
in Cripplegate. The dead-cart comes on its way (we are still in
the year of the plague), and the neighbours, thinking the man
dead, place him on the dead-cart among the corpses. By and by the
cart comes to the dead pit at Mountmill and the carter, his face
all muffled against the effluvium, lays hold of him to throw him
in; and he wakes up and struggles in his bewilderment. Where
am I? he says. You are about to be buried among the
dead, says the carter. But am I dead then? says the
man. And this too is a figure of him on his island.

Some London-folk continue to go about their
business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But
secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection
reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his
man, as if struck by lightning. And this is a figure for life
itself, the whole of life. Due preparation. We should make due
preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand. As
he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he
came one day upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a
print, and therefore a sign: of a foot, of a man. But it was a
sign of much else too. You are not alone, said the sign;
and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you
hide, you will be searched out.

In the year of the plague, writes his man,
others, out of terror, abandoned all, their homes, their wives
and children, and fled as far from London as they could. When the
plague had passed, their flight was condemned as cowardice on all
sides. But, writes his man, we forget what kind of courage was
called on to confront the plague. It was not a mere soldier's
courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like
charging Death itself on his pale horse.

Even at his best, his island parrot, the
better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak
by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his,
who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or
better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of
his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale
horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in
making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death
himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think
of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such
words come.

And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he,
Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing at all, until this man of
his began sending in reports.

The duckoys of the Lincolnshire fens, the
great engine of execution in Halifax: reports from a great tour
this man of his seems to be making of the island of Britain,
which is a figure of the tour he made of his own island in the
skiff he built, the tour that showed there was a farther side to
the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable, which he ever
afterwards avoided, though if in the future colonists shall
arrive upon the island they will perhaps explore it and settle
it; that too being a figure, of the dark side of the soul and the
light.

When the first bands of plagiarists and
imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the
public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they
seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling
upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not
scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the
cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour
me, he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the
thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these
cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that
would gnaw at the very substance of truth.

But now, reflecting further, there begins
to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his
imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful
of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to
prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence.

Thus in the narrative of his island
adventures he tells of how he awoke in terror one night convinced
the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog. So
he leapt to his feet and grasped a cutlass and slashed left and
right to defend himself while the poor parrot that slept by his
bedside shrieked in alarm. Only many days later did he understand
that neither dog nor devil had lain upon him, but rather that he
had suffered a palsy of a passing kind, and being unable to move
his leg had concluded there was some creature stretched out upon
it. Of which event the lesson would seem to be that all
afflictions, including the palsy, come from the devil and are the
very devil; that a visitation by illness may be figured as a
visitation by the devil, or by a dog figuring the devil, and vice
versa, the visitation figured as an illness, as in the saddler's
history of the plague; and therefore that no one who writes
stories of either, the devil or the plague, should forthwith be
dismissed as a forger or a thief.

When, years ago, he resolved to set down on
paper the story of his island, he found that the words would not
come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff and
reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing
business, until by the time of his adventures with Friday in the
frozen north the pages were rolling off easily, even
thoughtlessly.

That old ease of composition has, alas,
deserted him. When he seats himself at the little writing-desk
before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand feels as
clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before.

Does he, the other one, that man of his,
find the writing business easier? The stories he writes of ducks
and machines of death and London under the plague flow prettily
enough; but then so did his own stories once. Perhaps he
misjudges him, that dapper little man with the quick step and the
mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment he sits alone in
a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping the pen and
dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second
thoughts.

How are they to be figured, this man and
he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades
in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this
nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes
his nights too, who is absent only in the daytime, when he,
Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new arrivals and his man
gallops about the kingdom making his inspections?

Will this man, in the course of his
travels, ever come to Bristol? He yearns to meet the fellow in
the flesh, shake his hand, take a stroll with him along the
quayside and hearken as he tells of his visit to the dark north
of the island, or of his adventures in the writing business. But
he fears there will be no meeting, not in this life. If he must
settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he
would write that they are like two ships sailing in contrary
directions, one west, the other east. Or better, that they are
deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west,
the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close
enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy:
their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the
cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave.